Scripting the keyboard in JavaScript

It was bound to happen- JavaScript discovering your keyboard
that is. In this tutorial, I'll show you how JavaScript can be used to
detect what key(s) is pressed by the user, and react accordingly.

The
relevant event handlers

Before we officially jump in and start possessing your
visitor's keyboard, we need to examine first the new keyboard events These events are what make it
possible for JavaScript to "react" when a key is pressed:

Keyboard related event handlers

onkeypress:

invokes JavaScript code when a key is pressed

onkeydown:

invokes JavaScript code when a key is held down (but
not yet released)

onkeyup:

invokes JavaScript code when a key is has been released after being
pressed.

These events can be binded to most elements on the page,
though you'll probably be sticking to either the "document" element or form
field elements in most cases, as appealing as having your script react to a
keypress on a <h1> element is.

Binding a keyboard event to an element

To bind a keyboard event to an element, you can do so either
inside your script, or directly inside the element's tag inside your HTML: